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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

And who knows how much longer VC subsidized taxi services will last.

Now you've got me wondering, just how much wealth has been redistributed back to the general public from failed VC backed schemes over the last decade?

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Not sure how active it still is, but there's a site called VC Fund My Life (http://www.vcfml.com/) which catalogs coupons offered by start-ups for growth hacking (likely just VC money).

Not even close to enough.

I wonder if they knew that it would never work and were just feeling "philanthropic"

I wonder if you could post hoc write it off as a donation to the public, and deduct it from your taxes...

(I mean, I don't seriously wonder this, just hyperbolically)

You definitely can't write off a bad investment as a donation, but you can write it off as a capital loss.

A lot of it goes into inflated SF and Seattle real estate. Techies are paid near double there to afford to live there. I wonder what scenarios could dry up VC. ZIRP just seems to be driving more money that way.

Let’s get some healthcare startups funded and we can start taking about real money!

They tried already, it was called Theranos and it confirmed that “fake it till you make it” really shouldn’t be applied to healthcare

Sort of.

Theranos did a shitty job being a normal lab and lied about it, a startup that wanted to fake it until they made it could first setup an excellent normal lab, and then with customer consent, run their new lab processes in parallel with the excellent normal lab tests.

I suppose I'm stretching the definition of faking it a little far there, but I think it sort of follows the ethos.

They also had faulty tech and faulty promises and turned to regular labs to do the work they couldn't to try and cover up some of it.

I thought "Theranos did a shitty job being a normal lab and lied about it," addressed that.

There’s doing a shitty job, and then there is killing people with negligence

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